What’s new in the Library

Sissy home boys or domestic outlaws? Through a series of vivid case studies taken from across the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries, Matt Cook explores the emergence of these trenchant stereotypes and looks at how they play out in the home and family lives of queer men.

Ranging from the mid-19th century to the present, and from Edinburgh to Plymouth, this powerful collection explores the significance of locality in queer space and experiences in modern British history.

The chapters cover a broad range of themes from migration, movement and multiculturalism; the distinctive queer social and political scenes of different cities; and the ways in which places have been reimagined through locally led community history projects. The book challenges traditional LGBTQ histories which have tended to conceive of queer experience in the UK as a comprising a homogeneous, national narrative.

Edited by leading historians, the book foregrounds the voices of LGBTQ-identified people by looking at a range of letters, diaries, TV interviews and oral testimonies. It provides a unique and fascinating account of queer experiences in Britain and how they have been shaped through different localities.

Hurled words. Thrown objects. Dodged burgers.

A burger was thrown at Travis Alabanza on Waterloo Bridge in 2016. From this experience they have created a poetic, passionate performance piece based around the ‘burger’: the texture, and taste of being trans.

Their experiences include verbal abuse, ostracisation and being thrown out of a Top Shop changing room. The piece also explores the black trans experience.

How old is the oldest chat-up line between men? Who was the first ‘lesbian’? Were ancient Greek men who had sex together necessarily ‘gay’? And what did Shakespeare think about cross-dressing? A Little Gay History takes objects ranging from Ancient Egyptian papyri and the erotic scenes on the Roman Warren Cup to images by modern artists including David Hockney and Bhupen Khakhar to consider questions such as these. Explored are the issues behind forty artefacts from ancient times to the present, and from cultures across the world, to ask a question that concerns us all: how easily can we recognize love in history?

In 2014, Maia Kobabe, who uses e/em/eir pronouns, thought that a comic of reading statistics would be the last autobiographical comic e would ever write. At the time, it was the only thing e felt comfortable with strangers knowing about em. Now, “Gender queer” is here. Maia’s intensely cathartic autobiography charts eir journey of self-identity, which includes the mortification and confusion of adolescent crushes, grappling with how to come out to family and society, bonding with friends over erotic gay fanfiction, and facing the trauma and fundamental violation of pap smears.

Started as a way to explain to eir family what it means to be nonbinary and asexual, Gender Queer is more than a personal story: it is a useful and touching guide on gender identity-what it means and how to think about it-for advocates, friends, and humans everywhere.

This special deluxe hardcover edition of “Gender queer” features a brand-new cover, exclusive art and sketches, and a TK from creator Maia Kobabe.

‘All those layers of expectation that are thrust upon us; boy, masculine, femme, transgender, sexual, woman, real, are such a weight to carry round. I feel transgressive. I feel hybrid. I feel trans.’

In this radical and emotionally raw book, Juno Roche pushes the boundaries of trans representation by redefining ‘trans’ as an identity with its own power and strength, that goes beyond the gender binary.

Through intimate conversations with leading and influential figures in the trans community, such as Kate Bornstein, Travis Alabanza, Josephine Jones, Glamrou and E-J Scott, this book highlights the diversity of trans identities and experiences with regard to love, bodies, sex, race and class, and urges trans people – and the world at large – to embrace a ‘trans’ identity as something that offers empowerment and autonomy.

Powerfully written, and with humour and advice throughout, this book is essential reading for anyone interested in the future of gender and how we identify ourselves.

What does cisgender mean? What are people saying when they refer to “assigned” gender? Why is it not OK to say ‘preferred pronouns’? What is cis privilege? If you’re curious about the answers to these questions and want to learn more, this book is for you.

This easy-to-read guide offers information and advice to anyone wanting to understand more about trans experiences. It explains what gender identity is and arms you with the correct terminology to use. Filled with real-life examples and FAQs, it offers helpful strategies to navigate respectful conversations, speak up against transphobia and create inclusive relationships and spaces. It’s the ideal tool for anyone wanting to become a better ally to transgender and/or nonbinary people.

‘It’s a boy!’ or ‘It’s a girl!’ are the first words almost all of us hear when we enter the world. Before our names, before we have likes and dislikes – before we, or anyone else, has any idea who we are. And two years ago, as Juno Dawson went to tell her mother she was (and actually, always had been) a woman, she started to realise just how wrong we’ve been getting it.

Gender isn’t just screwing over trans people, it’s messing with everyone. From little girls who think they can’t be doctors to teenagers who come to expect street harassment. From exclusionist feminists to ‘alt-right’ young men. From men who can’t cry to the women who think they shouldn’t. As her body gets in line with her mind, Juno tells not only her own story, but the story of everyone who is shaped by society’s expectations of gender – and what we can do about it.

Featuring insights from well-known gender, feminist and trans activists including Rebecca Root, Laura Bates, Gemma Cairney, Anthony Anaxagorou, Hannah Witton, Alaska Thunderfuck and many more, “The gender games” is a frank, witty and powerful manifesto for a world in which everyone can truly be themselves.

In this stand alone follow up to The Bi-ble Anthology of Personal Narratives and Essays about Bisexuality, writers from across the UK and abroad present a range of new essays on various aspects of the bisexual experience. Whether you are bisexual, questioning, or just curious, these human and deeply moving pieces will open you to new perspectives and help you appreciate a wide variety of experiences.

Essays include:
Foreword by comedian Kemah Bob
Bidentity by Rebecca Wojturska
The hardest thing I’ve ever had to do: navigating multiple identities and coming out in Southeast Asian culture by Vaneet Mehta
Erotic computer: Janelle Monáe’s Black queer femme representation and the lens of Audre Lorde’s writing by Jessica Brough
All the things she said by Annie Dobson
‘Bisexual woman has sex with gay man’: not such an unusual story by Alizée Pichot
Thank God for straight cis male artists! – Queer representation in mainstream cinema by Chay Collins

‘Can’t turn off what turns me on’: St. Vincent and the masseduction of bisexual style by Eleanor Reid
How Louisa May Alcott helped me to survive being outed by Jo Landon
A man, a cane, an awkward title: adventures of a bisexual, disabled, genderqueer writer by Sandra Alland

The highly publicized obscenity trial of Radclyffe Hall’s “The Well of Loneliness” (1928) is generally recognized as the crystallizing moment in the construction of a visible modern English lesbian culture, marking a great divide between innocence and deviance, private and public, New Woman and Modern Lesbian. Yet despite unreserved agreement on the importance of this cultural moment, previous studies often reductively distort our reading of the formation of early 20th-century lesbian identity, either by neglecting to examine in detail the developments leading up to the ban or by framing events in too broad a context against other cultural phenomena.

“Fashioning sapphism” locates the novelist Radclyffe Hall and other prominent lesbians – including the pioneer in women s policing, Mary Allen, the artist Gluck, and the writer Bryher – within English modernity through the multiple sites of law, sexology, fashion, and literary and visual representation, thus tracing the emergence of a modern English lesbian subculture in the first two decades of the 20th century.

Drawing on extensive new archival research, the book interrogates anew a range of myths long accepted without question (and still in circulation) concerning, to cite only a few, the extent of homophobia in the 1920s, the strategic deployment of sexology against sexual minorities, and the rigidity of certain cultural codes to denote lesbianism in public culture.

This book explores the invisibility and invalidation of bisexuality from the past to the present and is unique in extending the discussion to focus on contemporary and emerging identities. Nikki Hayfield draws on research from psychology and the social sciences to offer a detailed and in-depth exploration of the invisibility and invalidation of bisexuality, pansexuality, and asexuality.

The book discusses how early sexologists’ understood gender and sexuality within a binary model and how this provided the underpinnings of bisexual invisibility. The existing research on biphobia and bisexual marginalisation is synthesised to explore how bisexuality has often been invisible or invalidated. Hayfield then evidences clear examples of the invisibility and invalidation of bisexuality, pansexuality, and asexuality within education, employment, mainstream mass media, and the wider culture. Throughout the book there is consideration of the impact that this invisibility and invalidation has on people’s sense of identity and on their health and wellbeing. It concludes with a discussion of how bisexuality, pansexuality, and asexuality have become somewhat more visible than in the past and the potential that visibility holds for recognition and representation.

This is fascinating reading for students and academics interested in in bisexuality, pansexuality, and asexual spectrum identities and for those who have a personal interest in bisexuality, pansexuality, and asexuality.

When Jackson’s son born through surrogacy came out to him at age 15, the successful producer, now in his 50s, was compelled to reflect on his experiences and share his wisdom on life for LGBTQ Americans over the past half-century.

Gay Like Me is a celebration of gay identity and parenting, and a powerful warning for his son, other gay men and the world. Jackson looks back at his own journey as a gay man coming of age through decades of political and cultural turmoil.

Jackson’s son lives in a seemingly more liberated America, and Jackson beautifully lays out how far we’ve come since Stonewall — the increased visibility of gay people in society, the legal right to marry, and the existence of a drug to prevent HIV. But bigotry is on the rise, ignited by a president who has declared war on the gay community and fanned the flames of homophobia. A newly constituted Supreme Court with a conservative tilt is poised to overturn equality laws and set the clock back decades. Being gay is a gift, Jackson writes, but with their gains in jeopardy, the gay community must not be complacent.

As Ta-Nehisi Coates awakened us to the continued pervasiveness of racism in America in Between the World and Me, Jackson’s rallying cry in Gay Like Me is an eye-opening indictment to straight-lash in America. This book is an intimate, personal exploration of our uncertain times and most troubling questions and profound concerns about issues as fundamental as dignity, equality, and justice.

“Gay like me” is a blueprint for our time that bridges the knowledge gap of what it’s like to be gay in America. This is a cultural manifesto that will stand the test of time. Angry, proud, fierce, tender, it is a powerful letter of love from a father to a son that holds lasting insight for us all.

Mohsin grew up in a poor pocket of east London, in a devout shia Muslim community. His family were close-knit and religiously conservative. From a young age, Mohsin felt different but in a home where being gay was inconceivable he also felt very alone.

Outside of home Mohsin went to a failing inner city school where gang violence was a fact of life. As he grew up life didn’t seem to offer teenage Mohsin any choices: he was disenfranchised from opportunity and isolated from his family as a closet gay Muslim.

But Mohsin had incredible drive and became the first person from his school to go to Oxford University. At university came the newfound freedom to become the man his parents never wanted him to be. But when he was confronted by his father and a witch doctor invited to ‘cure’ him Mohsin had to make a difficult choice.

Mohsin’s story takes harrowing turns but it is full of life and humour, and, ultimately, it is an inspiring story about breaking through life’s barriers.

At the dawn of the twentieth century, black women in the US were carving out new ways of living. The first generations born after emancipation, their struggle was to live as if they really were free.

These women refused to labour like slaves. Wrestling with the question of freedom, they invented forms of love and solidarity outside convention and law. These were the pioneers of free love, common-law and transient marriages, queer identities, and single motherhood – all deemed scandalous, even pathological, at the dawn of the twentieth century, though they set the pattern for the world to come.

In “Wayward lives, beautiful experiments”, Saidiya Hartman deploys both radical scholarship and profound literary intelligence to examine the transformation of intimate life that they instigated. With visionary intensity, she conjures their worlds, their dilemmas, their defiant brilliance.

Drawing on a wide range of historical sources – court records, newspaper reports, medical records, novels, oral histories and personal papers – A Lesbian History of Britain presents the extraordinary history of lesbian experience in Britain. Covering landmark moments and well-known personalities (such as Radclyffe Hall and the publication and banning of her lesbian novel The Well of Loneliness), but also examining the lives and experiences of ordinary women, it brings both variety and nuance to their shared history. In doing so, it also explores cultural representations of, and changing attitudes to, female same-sex desire in Britain.

The narrative is arranged chronologically and begins with the accounts of a number of women in the 18th century who passed themselves off as men. The C18th & C19th saw ‘Romantic Friendships’ between women and, later, the emergence of a science of sexuality, and the concept of the female ‘sexual invert”. At the same time, ‘New Women’ were pursuing independent careers, a self-confidence reflected in the publication of a number of novels explicitly about lesbian experience. The 20s and 30s were characterised by parliamentary debates on lesbianism, court cases and scandals, though, with two world wars, lesbian experiences were already changing, and a newly vibrant lesbian ‘scene’, centred on bars and night-clubs, was emerging, supported by a growing number of lesbian-oriented magazines and societies. The contemporary period has been marked by political movements and campaigns, in which lesbians have been active, and increasingly vocal debates surrounding the ‘sex wars’.

An engaging exploration of what it means to be asexual in a world that’s obsessed with sexual attraction, and what the ace perspective can teach all of us about desire and identity. What exactly is sexual attraction and what is it like to go through life not experiencing it? What does asexuality reveal about gender roles, about romance and consent, and the pressures of society?

This accessible examination of asexuality shows that the issues that aces face-confusion around sexual activity, the intersection of sexuality and identity, navigating different needs in relationships-are the same conflicts that nearly all of us will experience. Through a blend of reporting, cultural criticism, and memoir, Ace addresses the misconceptions around the “A” of LGBTQIA and invites everyone to rethink pleasure and intimacy. Journalist Angela Chen creates her path to understanding her own asexuality with the perspectives of a diverse group of asexual people. Vulnerable and honest, these stories include a woman who had blood tests done because she was convinced that “not wanting sex” was a sign of serious illness, and a man who grew up in a religious household and did everything “right,” only to realize after marriage that his experience of sexuality had never been the same as that of others.

Disabled aces, aces of color, gender-nonconforming aces, and aces who both do and don’t want romantic relationships all share their experiences navigating a society in which a lack of sexual attraction is considered abnormal. Chen’s careful cultural analysis explores how societal norms limit understanding of sex and relationships and celebrates the breadth of sexuality and queerness.